Hope, optimism and loneliness among first-year college students with learning disabilities: a brief longitudinal study

Abstract

The goals of the study were to examine personal resources and social distress during the first month in college among students with learning disabilities (LD) and to compare their experiences with non-LD peer. The sample consisted of 335 first-year undergraduate students falling into two groups: 85 students with LD and 250 non-LD students. Questionnaires assessed hope, dispositional optimism and loneliness. We hypothesised that, after participation in a single-session hope intervention workshop, the hope and optimism levels of both students with LD and without LD would increase, while their loneliness would decrease. However, after a month of facing the academic and social demands of their new college environment, we expected that the hope and optimism scores of students with LD would be lower than their peers without LD and that their loneliness scores would be higher. As hypothesised, both groups reported enhanced hope and optimism, as well as lower loneliness, immediately after the workshop. However, students with LD -but not their peers -returned to baseline levels of hope and loneliness after a month. Loneliness after a month predicted lower hope, after controlling predictors from the beginning of the year.

Hope as a Mediator of Loneliness and Academic Self‐efficacy Among Students With and Without Learning Disabilities during the Transition to College

“…Intervention studies have shown that hope can be enhanced through various approaches (Cheavens, Feldman, Gum, Michael, & Snyder, ; Feldman & Dreher, ; Marques, Lopez, & Pais‐Ribeiro, ). Yet students with LD may require extended support in order to maintain the impact of hope‐based intervention (Rosenstreich, Feldman, Davidson, Maza, & Margalit, ). Future work should address ways of altering existing interventions for this population.…”

The Role of Learning Difficulties in Adolescents’ Academic Emotions and Academic Achievement

“…We also focused on enjoyment, as it has been suggested as a particularly important academic emotion among primary school students (Ahmed, van der Werf, Kuyper, & Minnaert, 2013). In addition, we focused on hope, which can be assumed to be a relevant emotion among students with LD, as struggles often characterize their academic lives (Lackaye, Margalit, Ziv, & Ziman, 2006; Orly & Margalit, 2014; Rosenstreich, Feldman, Davidson, Maza, & Margalit, 2015). Furthermore, as reading and math difficulties have separate profiles (Landerl et al, 2009; Willcutt et al, 2013), and academic emotions have been shown to be domain specific (Goetz, Frenzel, & Pekrun, 2006), we examined both reading difficulties (RD) and math difficulties (MD) and their relationship to subject-specific academic emotions.…”

Why are you so optimistic? Effects of sociodemographic factors, individual experiences, and peer characteristics on optimism in early adolescents

“…Atienza et al () found that problems at work predicted decreasing optimism scores in adult women. Rosenstreich and colleagues (Rosenstreich, Feldman, Davidson, Maza, & Margalit, ) reported lower optimism among first‐year college students with learning disabilities compared to those without learning disabilities. Segerstrom () investigated whether resource growth influences the optimism of graduates from law school and suggested that increases in social networks (i.e., a higher number of friends) predicted subsequent increases in optimism.…”